Primary Source’s Making Freedom: African Americans in United States History, was originally published in 2004, and was composed of five teacher sourcebooks. The forward and context essays, written by scholars of that time, were designed to provide background information necessary to understanding the primary sources and activities in each unit. In the spirit of consistency, we have opted to include the original context essays, as additional “further resources” that educators may opt to review in order to deepen their context knowledge further. It is important to note however, that unless otherwise noted, these context essays are presented here in their original form and have not been edited since their original publication. As a result, these essays may no longer reflect the most up to date historical information and/or may not reflect the instructional, pedagogical or culturally responsive approaches and linguistic expectations of today.
In Hope of Liberty, An introductory essay
Dr. James O. Horton & Dr. Lois Horton
Book 3: “Lift Ev’ry Voice”: Speaking For Freedom, Context Essay 1
2004
Introduction
In a speech before the House of Representatives in the early spring of 1818 Henry Clay, Representative from Kentucky, echoed the sentiments of the Revolutionary generation when he declared: “An oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters.” A boy named Frederick was born into slavery early that year in Maryland, a boy who would grow up to take such words to heart. Indeed, as a man, Frederick Douglass trumpeted this message to the nation and to the world, demanding freedom for all slaves.
Most of the founding fathers who had struggled to establish a government of free men were slaveholders who did not consider African American slaves entitled to freedom. These opposing understandings of the ideals of liberty exposed a great contradiction at the heart of the early nation, a nation dedicated to freedom, whose social and economic life depended on slavery. This tension between American ideals and American reality shaped political challenges for Clay’s generation. These tensions had led the founding fathers to remain silent on the question of slavery as they drew up the Constitution, never referring to it directly, so as to appease the large slaveholding states. At the same time, they increased slaveholders’ political power by counting three out of five of their slaves for the purposes of state representation in Congress.
As new states were added to the Union, the issue of slavery prompted other political concessions, as when the Missouri Compromise of 1820 maintained the balance by pairing the admission of the slave state of Missouri and the free state of Maine. Congress engaged in a continual process of compromise to forestall more serious conflict between the power of southern slavery and the growing forces of antislavery reform. Clay, a slaveholder himself, played an important role, becoming known as the “Great Compromiser”. In a final desperate decade, the Compromise of 1850, with its new stronger fugitive slave law, and the Kansas Nebraska Act, with its provision for settlers themselves to decide whether a state would be slave or free, actually created more serious conflict. When compromise failed in the late 1850s, Frederick Douglass was one of many abolitionists who believed that victory by Union troops would fulfill the promise of the American Revolution.
Slave labor and the African slave trade had been mainstays of the British economy in all thirteen American colonies. Differences in climate, landscape, and demographics gradually led the southern colonies to a greater dependence on slave labor, while northern shippers dominated the slave trade. Revolutionary rhetoric bolstered the strength of voices against slavery and, as new states formed out of territories, slavery was abolished or set on the road to abolition in the northern states. Vermont abolished slavery in its constitution of 1777, Massachusetts ended slavery after a decision of its Supreme Court in 1783, and slaveholding rapidly diminished in New Hampshire. Provisions for the gradual abolition of slavery were enacted by Rhode Island, Connecticut and Pennsylvania in the 1780s, by New York in 1799 and New Jersey in 1804.
In the South, however, slaveholders dominated state and local politics, sending to Congress advocates for an economy increasingly dominated by human bondage. A technological revolution, bringing the cotton gin that dramatically increased cotton production and made slave labor more valuable, set the stage for the expansion of slavery into the states of the Deep South carved from Thomas Jefferson’s 1803 Louisiana Purchase. One of the results was the break up of an extraordinary number of enslaved families, as slave traders met the demand for labor. Profits and wealth increased as planters moved their cotton to market on new steam powered riverboats. By the time Andrew Jackson became president in 1828, cotton was the country’s most valuable export, slavery was the most important labor system in the South, and national politicians were preoccupied with balancing the interests of slave and free states as the United States expanded westward.
Freedom from slavery in northern states did not however bring equal rights to African Americans. Ironically, as one northern state after another freed African Americans from bondage, they restricted, often for the first time, the rights of the newly freed blacks. Historians have traditionally referred to the Jacksonian era as the era of the common man, meaning that, as states abolished property requirements for voting, elections became more open and American democracy became broader and available to more common men. Yet even as this democratization went on, free blacks who in many northern states had the right to vote were often removed from the voting roles as “white” became a necessary qualification for voting in states like New Jersey and Connecticut. Most mid-western states not only restricted African American voting rights, but also instituted special laws to restrict their access to the court system, keeping them off juries, and not allowing them to testify against whites. Some states restricted the rights of African Americans to hold property or even to settle in the state. Ohio required blacks to post a bond to live in the state, and Indiana and Illinois went farther, barring blacks entirely. In the West, Oregon also prohibited black settlement and California’s officials placed heavy restrictions on African American rights, almost writing a black exclusion clause into its state constitution. Although slavery may have been isolated in the South, racial prejudice and injustice was very much a national phenomenon in the pre-Civil War era.
If the ideals of the Revolution did not prevent the racial restriction of American liberty, some Americans did protest the obvious inhumanity of slavery. Although the first organized antislavery efforts can be traced from the 18th century, the 1830s witnessed the rise of significant reform activity aimed at immediate emancipation. African Americans had led the way, protesting informally and through their churches and other institutions. Free blacks had the greatest opportunities to make their voices heard, but even slaves protested when they could, such as during the Revolution, when many slaves sent petitions to Congress and state legislatures demanding freedom for themselves and their families.
Throughout the decades before the Civil War, blacks continued to organize and protest against slavery, working through their fraternal groups, such as Boston’s Prince Hall Masonic Lodge, and benevolent organizations, such as the African Societies formed in many northern cities. During the 1820s the Massachusetts General Colored Association was established specifically as an African American antislavery organization, and in 1831 blacks allied with white abolitionists to form the New England Antislavery Society. Interracial protest action often rose as part of the stunning religious revival movement known as the Second Great Awakening that burned over many of the small towns and farming communities of the North and even caught fire in many of the cities. Both African American and white preachers railed against the un-Christian injustice of slavery, raising northern white consciousness, and alerting millions to its horrors. Where the abolitionist message was strong, thousands of converts were brought to the cause of human freedom, but the political and economic power of the slaveholding South remained a formidable foe.
Even as the abolition movement grew more popular in northern society during the 1850s, it never drew the allegiance of more than a minority. During the 1830s and 1840s anti-abolitionist mobs attacked antislavery meetings and endangered abolitionist speakers. William Lloyd Garrison, white abolitionist editor of the Liberator, was captured by a mob in Boston in 1835 and saved only by the intervention of Boston blacks in but one example of the violence abolitionists faced. The list of such attacks is long and
sometimes even deadly. In 1837 an Alton, Illinois mob murdered abolitionist editor Elijah P. Lovejoy and destroyed his newspaper. Black abolitionists were often the special targets of mobs as they traveled though the North and Mid-West spreading the antislavery message. They were singled out because they were black and because they were so effective in telling their personal stories of slavery, shocking white audiences into the realization of its horrors. Harriet Tubman, a former slave from Maryland, and Sojourner Truth, who had been a slave in New York State, held listeners spellbound with their autobiographies. The great Frederick Douglass became the most powerful
antislavery speaker on both sides of the Atlantic as African Americans and their white American allies joined the grand abolitionist tours in Great Britain and on the continent of Europe. These joint efforts kept abolition alive and reformers active in what became an international movement for human freedom.
In the United States, throughout the North and in many areas of the South as well, African Americans and whites joined in an effort to aid slaves in escaping bondage in what became known as the Underground Railroad. The term was broadly used to encompass both the organized activities of abolitionist groups with elaborately structured networks of safe-houses and transport routes as well as the more generalized humanitarian actions of individuals aiding human beings in need on an informal, ad hoc bases. Figures are difficult to confirm, but historians suggest that between 60,000 and 100,000 fugitive slaves were helped to freedom along the erratic lines of the Underground Railroad. They moved southward into Mexico from the plantations of the western deep South, north into the free states from the eastern and upper South and even into the West Indies or Europe by ship from port cities like New Orleans and Charleston.
Since fugitives were always vulnerable to recapture, especially after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law strengthened the ability of slaveholders to regain their constitutionally protected human property, Canada became the promised land of freedom for many fugitives. Some forty thousand fugitives found shelter in free black settlements that sprang up in Canada. In Toronto, Windsor, Chatham, Wilberforce and many other Canadian communities, African Americans supported newspapers, organized antislavery societies and raised recruits to support antislavery action in the United States. These communities grew in importance during the 1850s as military clashes between abolitionists and pro-slavery forces intensified in the Kansas territory after 1854. When John Brown planned his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, he sought support and recruits among the blacks of Chatham in Canada.
These years during the 1850s were critical ones not only for the fate of African Americans and for the antislavery movement, but also for the nation itself. The art of political compromise that had held the United States together since the Revolution, and that had been necessary to sustain a union between one society built on a commitment to slave labor and another built on free labor, was no longer effective after 1850. People’s determined defiance of the fugitive slave law, the stubborn political protest against slavery, and the continual campaign to move northern public opinion towards opposition to the powerful pro-slavery influence are major themes of America history during this period. They also illustrate the intersection of African American history and national history. Interracial alliances were complex and controversial political and social issues at that time. Today they are critical to our understanding both of the society devolving in those years and of the society of our own time.
The documents in this book help to elucidate the dynamic era that lead to the Civil War. While focusing directly on various aspects of the African American experience, they also help to set the context for discussing all of American history during this time. In the speeches, poems and letters of those who had experienced first hand the horrors of slavery, in the accounts of those who risked their lives and property to break slavery’s grip, in the stories of those who attempted to hold families together and build lives in the midst of the United State’s most chaotic era, we see the powerful impact of a determined people on the course of their society and their nation.